Inhabitable Toys: 5 Inspiring Interactive Furniture Ideas

A Mexican Army Knife sounds silly at first, but really: is there any good reason not to apply the same fold-out functionality of a Swiss Army Knife on a larger scale? Ivan Hernandez has a habit of coming with with designs that have humorous elements that also show his keen eye for design innovation and tendency toward thought-provoking ideas.

Take this teeter-totter table-and-chairs for example: there is a level of heightened interactivity and certainly a call for playful engagement but there is also a call to community here, a built-in demand that more than one person sit at the table at the same time.

Similarly, this interactive table design makes passing items into a shared game, a kind of community experiment that calls on us to fit form with function and work together to get what we want.

Shelving is rarely shared by roommates (or even couples in some cases), but these box-based, construct-as-needed shelf units are specifically geared toward a back-and-forth process of collectively stacking, arranging and rearranging as they are built – and each unit relies on others for structural support and balance, making them uniquely expressive but also entirely interdependent.

Though mutually-reliant in a different way the same theme comes across in these interconnected blocks. Strung together in tension with hidden wires, they can be rotated to create different configurations but are ultimately inseparable – all of the blocks have to work together or not at all, and the same could be said for the people sitting on them.